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You Hear What They Said About You?

So today Politico published a piece about how the White House is really disdainful of liberal bloggers for not celebrating the administration's successes or being understanding enough about the political circumstances that led to their losses. The piece quotes exactly one "top Obama adviser" anonymously who supports this claim. Ironically, most of the advisers quoted in the piece reflect exactly what liberal bloggers have been saying for weeks -- that the economy is the only thing that matters when it comes to the president's approval. My favorite part of the piece is the section on the "liberal echo chamber," since any "echo chamber" that contains Glenn Greenwald, Jon Chait, Ezra Klein and Jane Hamsher isn't an echo chamber so much as a blogger Royal Rumble.

I'm not sure whether this reflects the general feeling in the administration, and I'm not sure I care. But it seems blatantly obvious that the piece itself is meant to draw Internet traffic by piggybacking off a general and predictable reaction from some quarters of the blogosphere that treat such anonymous statements as gospel.

But the impression that I always get from these stories is that this is just some staffer venting. I'm assuming that the administration has too much on its plate to really fret about this stuff. Maybe I'm wrong, but this is the kind of story that has something for everyone -- the "librul" media gets to engage in some hippie punching, some liberal blogs get to feel important, conservatives get to mock the other side and Politico gets a whole lot of traffic. It's all just little too perfect, isn't it?

About the Author

Adam Serwer is a writing fellow at The American Prospect and a graduate of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He also blogs at Jack and Jill Politics and has written for The Village Voice, The Washington Post, The Root, and the Daily News. Follow @adamserwer